Global Security Newswire July 3, 2002
Commercial Satellites to Enhance WMD Detection
By Bryan Bender
WASHINGTON - New U.S. plans to substantially increase its reliance on Commercial satellites will help to verify arms control treaties and to uncover illegal or other suspect weapons development programs, government officials, industry experts and private analysts told Global Security Newswire this week. The move will make publicly available more timely, precise and affordable pictures of the Earth than ever before, they predicted.
Greater access to high-resolution space imagery would assist international arms inspectors, strengthen diplomatic efforts to pressure would-be proliferators and treaty violators, and otherwise improve the ability of governments, international bodies, independent analysts and nongovernmental organizations to examine WMD-related activities around the globe.
CIA Director George Tenet last month directed the U.S. intelligence community to utilize U.S. commercial space imagery "to the greatest extent possible" and reserve government-owned spy satellites for the most specialized and sensitive of missions. The intelligence chief called on the community to take "all possible steps to remove any remaining institutional obstacles" to using commercial imagery.
The directive is expected to boost the commercial remote sensing industry, which has struggled to find a stable customer base. As a result, it has not realized its potential for advancing global transparency in the decade since increasingly high-resolution space images have become available to the public.
"My goal in establishing this policy is to stimulate, as quickly as possible, and maintain, for the foreseeable future, a robust U.S. commercial space imagery industry," Tenet told the Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency in the June 7 directive, a copy of which was obtained by GSN.
NIMA Director James Clapper said in an interview with Space News this week that he intends to process this imagery "as quickly as the data collected by U.S. national security satellites."
Greater Availability of Space Imagery
Companies such as Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe today operate satellitesthat take images capable of detecting objects smaller than one meter square - not as precise as government-owned satellites with resolutions measured in inches, but nevertheless highly revealing. When customers request an image be taken of a particular location, at a cost of thousands of dollars, under most circumstances the image is then placed in the company's archives for sale. Archived images cost substantially less; in the case of Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite, about $350 each, a recent reduction from $500, according to company officials.
"Our hope is there will be more imagery in the archive and that will enable them to sell imagery at a lower cost," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, an arms control group frequently uses commercial space imagery to conduct independent analysis of suspected nuclear and missile facilities.
According to Corey Hinderstein, a remote sensing expert at the Institute for Science and International Security, "the purchase of an image out of the archive is a set amount while tasking the satellite is more expensive. If governments are buying more images and they are showing up in the archives then it may be easier for other governments and nongovernmental organizations to buy the images."
"At a minimum, the fact that the government is keeping these firms viable would be useful and beneficial for anyone who would want to use imagery for broader public policy purposes," added John Baker, a space policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.
Increased Global Transparency
Government and private experts envision a variety of benefits to the arms control and disarmament communities. Commercial imagery could be used more frequently by on-site inspectors such as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is now seeking to return to Iraq (see related GSN story, today), or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In inspecting an alleged suspected weapons of mass destruction facility, a satellite image from the previous few days would be useful to determine any recent activities, such as the removal of equipment. "There is no better way of finding your way around if you have an image of the facility," Pike said.
Moreover, the process of disseminating commercial images does not suffer from the same thorny issues of classification as those taken by a government satellite and then provided to an international body such as UNMOVIC or the IAEA. "This is precisely the kind of imagery they would be interested in using because it doesn't have classification," Pike said.
As a result, a country such as Iraq could no longer accuse the United Nations of complicity with national intelligence agencies for its reliance on their spy photos. "It eliminates an area of contention on both sides," said Hinderstein. "The inspecting agency can get timely and accurate information when and where they need it, but not from national systems."
Increased use of commercial imagery will build upon what a recent RAND report calls a "growing interest of nongovernmental organizations and multinational agencies in taking advantage of these data to address specific international problems." This includes, for example, enabling nongovernmental experts to "use commercial satellite imagery to detect and identify, despite highly restricted external access, suspicious facilities that could be part of a nuclear weapon program" or to "understand what transpired at the nuclear test sites at which India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear detonations in 1998."
Pike calls this "looking over other people's shoulders." By looking through the archived images of a commercial imagery company, he said, one can get a sense of what governments are interested in. "A lot of agencies out there in the United States and other governments know where a lot of these [suspect facilities] are located much more than we do," he said. "So one strategy has been to look for places that they have a lot of imagery of. If someone like the U.S. government with a lot of money is interested in a particular site, maybe we should be, too." A recent example of this, he said, is a large amount of imagery taken by the IKONOS satellite of a particular location in Iran. "Very early on, someone bought a lot of Space Imaging photos of secret cities in Russia," he said.
"It will be known if the United States goes out and looks at a site like a South Asian nuclear reactor," added Baker. Mark Brender, executive director of government affairs for Space Imaging, acknowledges that the growing archive can hint at where the government is looking. "You can map people's fears," he said.
Public Diplomacy
Commercial imagery could also be critical to the success of public diplomatic efforts to force action against arms control violations or illegal developments. It can be used for "illustrative purposes and public diplomacy to highlight something at a controversial Iraqi or Iranian location, for example," Baker pointed out.
"Commercial imagery is a way for a country that doesn't want to show its national capability to show images to others," added Hinderstein, noting that commercial imagery was used in negotiations with North Korea to suspend its nuclear program.
Despite the U.S. plan to become the commercial remote sensing ndustry's biggest customer, experts acknowledge that several unknowns remain that could diminish the trickle-down effect.
The United States could exercise its right to classify certain commercial images under the guise of national security or pay to have a certain image kept out of the archive, restricting access of images of the most sensitive sites by keeping them out of public reach.
With only special and highly expensive exceptions, however, industry officials say the images will eventually be put in the archive. For example, the United States last year temporarily purchased exclusive rights to IKONOS images of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Except for U.S. bases, all of those images, 470,000 square kilometers, are now available for public purchase.
Copyright © 2002, Global Security Newswire
